More on Daniel Berrigan's Forgotten (?) Legacy of Advocacy for LGBTQ People: A Reader Comments

I'm very grateful for the good conversation that has developed here around the topic of Dan Berrigan's witness to Catholic values of social justice and peacemaking in his pastoral outreach to LGBTQ people, especially people with AIDS. I blogged about this issue this morning, and want once again to make a statement of thanks to both BronxVoter and Bob Shine for correcting what is perhaps an excessively negative or critical focus in my own thinking about this legacy. Both Bronx and Bob pointed me to valuable resources that help me reframe what I think about this legacy.

Daniel Berrigan's Legacy: The Forgotten (?) Advocacy for LGBTQ People

Several days ago, I finished reading Patrick Gale's latest novel, A Place Called Winter. A reader of this blog who's also connected to me by Facebook recommended the novel to me, as well as I can remember, and I'm very grateful to her, because I found the novel's recreation (or imagining might be a more precise term) of an early 20th-century gay love story in Saskatchewan engrossing. 

If You Cherish Daniel Berrigan's Legacy, Do Not Forget the Racist Roots of the Trump Phenomenon — and of the U.S. Catholic Bishops' Bogus "Religious Freedom" Crusade

Daniel Berrigan, No Bars to Manhood (NY: Doubleday, 1970), p. 64

In his moving tribute in this morning's Washington Post to Daniel Berrigan, who died yesterday,  fellow Catholic radical and peace activist Colman McCarthy reminds us that Berrigan spent two years in federal prison after burning draft files at the old Knights of Columbus hall housing a Secret Service office in Catonsville, Maryland, in 1968. As McCarthy notes, Berrigan was a "willing recidivist" who was repeatedly arrested for protesting the American military machine. He died with a rap sheet as long as his winding sheet.